Me looking at the pond

A birthday message

Been around the sun 53 times! Is that an accomplishment? Yes absolutely. Accomplishment for my parents too, and testament to all the nurturing and caring that friends, community, and the earth have provided. If staying alive is the principal goal, I’m doing good so far. The basics are there. I am so grateful.

I’ve had a year. This time last year I was getting a biopsy for the possibility of endometrial cancer. It never occurred to me that it would be positive. Honestly. I barely contemplated that option. So when I got the call from the doctor, I had no mind rehearsals to fall back on. I went blank. Maybe I would have gone blank anyway. It’s possible. When reality suddenly shifts like that, it may be almost impossible not to blink in paralysed disbelief.

From there it was appointments, scans, blood tests, surgery, chemo, radiation. It was a big change. But it also had a quality of being completely ordinary, part of the human experience. I stayed curious throughout and there were interesting moments, lonely moments, despairing moments, delightful moments.

I’m enjoying being done with treatment. It’s a rebirth of sorts. And like any birth, it’s terrifyingly exhilarating. I am emerging from this intense period of my life with less fear and more love.

One of the first things I noticed about my rapidly changing mind after the diagnosis was that there were two voices that became louder. One was saying: “Well, we’ve had a good life, dying is ok.” And the other saying “NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” These two voices had always been there, but now they were duking it out. What would you do to stay alive? Every treatment decision was a tussle between those two voices with a large supply of statistics mixed in.

For years I’ve pondered the will to live. Where does it come from? What makes life want to stay alive? In the end I came to the conclusion that though love is not the mechanism, it is definitely the manifestation of it in our bodies. We stay alive by going towards life-giving things, that’s love. And we are all of us hopelessly in love with the world. Those two voices are both lovers. One feels the sadness of impermanence, losing the things we love. One wants to drink in every possible moment of love that can be had. They are a good pair.

Right now, 3.5 months after the last treatment, I feel strange. Not in a bad way. Deconstructed in a way that I’m not sure I want to reconstruct or at least not as solidly.

And we’re in such a strange moment anyway, aren’t we? I think that might be a shared experience? Much stability lost, and a lack of shared vision at practically any scale. A legacy of decades of individualism. It’s weird to say this as an introvert but man I gotta join some groups! Or form one! Or both!

A couple weeks ago I finished reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger (highly recommend). She urges imagination, to collectively come up with something different and then just go for it, adjusting as we go. As much as our doppelgänger wants to destroy, we can want to build. Creation will always have an edge over destruction. It’s the nature of life. But we do need to pick up the pace…lots of destruction happening. I read in one of the newsletters I follow that instead of “resilient” in the face of climate change we should use the word “courageous”. The thinking is that it changes it from a defensive stance to a creative one and might help us keep our eye on the ball. Not a bad idea.

Less fear more love – my wish is for more of that. And more strangeness, and more oddballs, and more laughter. A commitment to enacting some great personas. There are some ideas percolating and I’ll write about them soon. Meanwhile, I thank the oddballs in my life for all the sparkles. I love what we create together. Let’s team up more.

With love and oddball courage,
Maria

———-
From the last year, here are some books and concepts that made me go aah.

– Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein
– Moonbound by Robin Sloan
– Not Too Late – essays edited by Solnit, Young, and Lutunatabua
– Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
– Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
– The First Rule of Mastery by Michael Gervais
– Tuesdays with Morrie
– Markov Blankets
– Any talk by Joscha Bach
– Many many articles and podcasts about AI and experiences with AI.
– The many conversations I had with the trees.
– The many hours I spent observing the ducks, crows, chickadees, wrens, sparrows, etc etc
– The generous sky

No doubt I’m forgetting a lot but it’s a good sampling. I feel well nourished and ready for whatever.

The photo is from early April, about two weeks after the last treatment. Taken by Steve McGinty.

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gathered materials

Epic Walk Diaries (November 18)

monochrome golden
  determination
delightfully interruped
     by
 sari orange
pink orange
 red or turmeric
   yes but shimmery

it's like a two-shelled
  berry
    the inner berry is
     ummm orange
 sari orange

the sweetness of mom

 frost! November
muck
  so satisfying
   imagine being barefoot

listen look
    a calling bird
  brambles
   silence    we wait
   leaves quiver
 weaving as hopping
  as small as a finch

we want order
  no chaos
 no, chaos
   chaos!!!!

fear
  the ultimate investigation?
 or one like any other
   which tunnel to go down
 do all tunnels lead to...
  no head?

layers of white
  fireweed forests
 curled by gravity
    hooked by brambles
     so much stuff
  that can be grabbed onto
 don't worry. they love you.

the absence spoken
 of skeleton leaves
   tissue-like   materialized
  the magic of attention

defiant yellow
  untriggered!
    brilliant life burst
   in brown entropy
 a tertiary display

the rest of canada hates us

----------
[
  Start 2:30pm
  End 4:30pm
  Pacific Spirit lot, back to Acadia beach,
  up Marine, back to the lot,
  past the sunlighted streams,
  a close brush with wreck beach,
  up to the burrowing grove,
  zig zag through trees, cliffs, brambles
  back down burrowing grove,
  and the lot.
  hello lola.
]
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Epic Walk Sep 3 (gatherings)

Epic Walk Diaries (September 3)

moby moby x2 maybe
not sure how much got in
science is constrained creativity
  art bounces off people
  science bounces off the universe

fear 
i can't do this
no truer words
  don't worry, it'll come back
  then you die again

 none of this is ours
   or theirs damnit
   be bold
peasant grass
  you let yourself go
designer grass
   tight weave
upscale private grass
    small bred patterns
   even your color says good dna
 look where you get to be
cartoon rich

the sound of peasant grass
  crickets and walking feet

rose petal feast
  mom, her jam and pastry

pineapple plant
  it does smell like pineapple!
    keith loved it

discarded fragments
  more fragments
   pattern! source!
a nut? a flower
   yes with seeds
     opened in quarters
       two quartered seeds
     look at the ground

  not so good with transitions
    sprint!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
      run to the finish line and jump
   no no ritual endings

-----

[
  Start 5:26pm
  End 9:00pm
  Through kits beach, pool, sunset point
  brambles, rich road, Jericho, Spanish Banks,
  concession, and back.
]
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I Am Afraid

For the last 5 months or so, I’ve been working on a new networked social VR application called I Am Afraid. This application brings together ideas that have been on my mind for over a year, perhaps longer. Ideas around voice, poetry, sculpture, and performance. Many people asked where the idea for IAA came from and I am surprised that I can’t remember the moment, or a moment, when I decided I wanted to see words and play with sounds in VR. I do know there have been lots of inspirations along the way, including the work I did with Greg Judelman in flowergarden, voice work with my friend Matthew Spears, clowning, theatre, friendly poets (Andrew Klobucar, Glen Lowry), sound artists (Simon Overstall, Julie Andreyev, prOphecy Sun), etc.

The basic idea is to build sound compositions and sculptures using textual and abstract objects that have embedded recorded sounds. When you are in the environment, you can speak words and have them appear as textual objects, and utter sounds that appear as abstract objects. Both kinds of objects contain the sound of your voice and can be replayed in a variety of ways. By intersecting with the objects, the sounds can be played back. The textual objects can be played in parts and at any speed/direction, using granular synthesis. The abstract sounds can be looped. Paths can be recorded through the objects and looped. In this way layered soundscapes can be created. The objects can also be interacted with in different ways like shaking and moving which alters the sound quality. Other actions are also planned, fleshing out a longstanding idea around a sonification engine based on the physicality of interaction with words.

I am often asked why the application is called I Am Afraid. As I was starting work on the application in January, I could sense an escalation of fear in the world, in my surroundings. I have been exploring fear for the last 17 years through different paths including meditation and art. One of the features of fear is that when we feel it, when it grips us, we start talking to ourselves. This is a bit a trap because we get more and more removed from what is actually going on. One of the goals of IAA is to externalize the discursiveness and be playful with the words and sounds. It can be a way to lighten up and see things more clearly, shift the internal dialogue. And it’s fun.

I used the application during my TEDxECUAD talk last March, which is about fear and technology. I’ve also used it in a performance at AR in Action, a conference at NYU at the beginning of June. It’s a great environment for performance (solo or group), exploration, and composition. I’ll be working on it for some time to come, adding features and (hopefully soon) porting it to Augmented Reality.

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